Friday, January 07, 2011

Holiday cards, final report

We received roughly 30 holiday cards this year. I'm estimating because some got lost in the piles of other papers, others -- such as greetings from acquaintances that contained not so veiled pitches related to their business ventures -- fell into that gap between friendly correspondence and junk envelopes that I've decided to call "funk mail."

This was down a bit from last year, but not dramatically. What was noticeable was how late most of the cards arrived and how few of them contained anything more than ritual salutations and signatures.

Decades of withering, sarcastic criticism of family form letters have taken their toll. People are too busy to write personal notes on their cards and too self-conscious to generate five or six paragraphs of boilerplate to catch up their friends on their doings.

A hat tip to those of you who did offer an update, particularly the family that sent a year-in-review in verse (rhyming "summer" with "bummer" to report the mid-year death of a parent was an interesting choice).

What's odd to me about the general avoidance of Christmas-time letters is that the entire social networking revolution is based on the idea that we all have a circle of associates that are at least mildly interested in what we're doing. Yet some still consider it presumptuous to send information just once a year to people to whom they are or at least once were actually close.

I was much happier to receive holiday e-mails with attached letters and photos than I was to get generic cards with signatures or photo cards with no supporting information.

We sent out about 75 cards with a couple of hundred pre-printed words about what we're up to ( the average 35- to 64-year-old sent 16.2 holiday cards in 2008, according to US Post Office stats). Next year, though, we're going with .pdf greetings.

1) Frugality. Why waste money on a piece of folded paper that's going to be chucked in a couple of weeks? ... 2) The end of the address book. ...Many of us don't have the faintest idea where anyone lives these days, so addressing an envelope means sending an e-mail to get the person's address, at which point you have already fulfilled one of the main purposes of the exercise ...3) The triumph of the e-card....4) Mom liberation. This year, women made up a majority of the work force for the first time. ...Maybe 2010 is the year we finally said, To hell with it, I'm not staying up late tonight to lick envelopes.5) Facebook. Also known as the "I already know what you did last summer" theory. ...In 2010, people don't need to wait for December to brag. They've been doing it all year.

Posted at 10:47:28 AM

Comments

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I send out about 150 cards a year. I make sure that part of them are to older people who love to get cards but probably can't send one back. We received about 87 cards this year. I love seeing them in our home and am more than willing to support the USPS.

We sent out about 80 cards. No letter this year, but the card was 2 pictures of the kids and 1 of the whole family.
We received many fewer cards than previous years. I think facebook has a lot to do with it.
I am a bit old fashion and think the time and energy put into a holiday card is nice and shows a bit of work. Facebook we just post and others can look. Not much effort on our part. But a letter is addressed to a specific person. It shows we took time and care to reach out to this person.
I hope the mailed holiday card survives and revives.

We noticed a big decrease this year in the cards we get and for the first time ever we did not send cards partly because we are connected to so many people via email and Facebook.

One cool idea we saw this year: one friend mailed a traditional card without his customary newsletter and provided a link to a youtube video where he gave a funny update on the family. It was really cool to see and hear him rather than just reading his letter.

I got a couple packages (8 in each package) of color-them-yourself cards through Scholastic. It kept the girls occupied for a while. I wrote a brief note in each one and had my older daughter "sign" her name. I added my younger daughter's and husband's names. I enclosed a family photo that we had done on Halloween. No newsletter. People seemed to like the cards. Many people told me I color very nicely.

We got about 15 cards in return, mostly from the same crowd we get every year. Two had newsletters, about six were just photocards. The rest were traditional cards, some with a brief note, some just signed.

Business holiday cards are what get me. Our firm sends out several thousand - some attorneys just send one to everyone in their contacts. The card was completely generic* and at most the attorneys just scrawled their names (some didn't even manage that much). We sent them out on December 22, so they probably arrived the week of December 27. How insulting. Next year we're apparently going with e-cards, which is apparently what most firms already do. How even more insulting.

*so generic in fact that several other firms apparently used exactly the same design. I saw several that had other firms' names and logos on them. Hope people were looking before they stuffed envelopes.

Just sending out the New Year's cards now. Received about 30, but about 10 of those are boring ones from aunts, etc. Agree that mockery has all but done in the wrap-up letter, but even with Facebook, these are useful, and I miss them. My cousin still sends one with all the details of his fencing contests, his travels with every little gripe documented, and details of seemingly every penny he spent ovr the year.

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